Foucault News

Ege Selin Islekel, Nightmare Remains. The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance, Northwestern University Press, 2024

Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning

Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.

Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.

Jonas Oßwald, Deleuze und Foucault. Ein Dialog, Campus, 2024

Über das Buch
Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault verband eine »philosophische Freundschaft«, so der Tenor. Doch trotz zahlreicher gegenseitiger Bezugnahmen, lobender Rezensionen und füreinander verfasster Vorworte gibt es bisher kaum Arbeiten, die sich mit dem philosophischen Gehalt dieser Beziehung befassen. Jonas Oßwald zeigt erstmals die grundlegende und durchgehende dialogische Verflechtung der Philosophien Deleuze’ und Foucaults, von den frühen transzendentalphilosophischen Überlegungen bis hin zur Frage der Macht, in der sich die Konturen von zwei komplex miteinander verwobenen Machtphilosophien abzeichnen, die sich trotz aller Differenzen und Spannungen letztlich in einem heterogenen Produktionsbegriff der Macht treffen.

Summary in English:
There is a general consensus that Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault were connected by a “philosophical friendship.” Nevertheless, despite numerous references, laudatory reviews, and forewords written for each other, there are few works that address the philosophical content of this relationship. In this study, Jonas Oßwald presents a comprehensive analysis of the intertwined and continuous dialogical relationship between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s philosophies. From their early transcendental-philosophical explorations to the problem of power, the study illuminates the intricate interweaving of two distinct yet interconnected philosophies, which, despite all their inherent differences and tensions, ultimately converge in a heterogeneous concept of productive power.

Malcolm Voyce, Foucault and Family Relations. Governing from a Distance in Australia, Lexington Books, 2019

Foucault and Family Relations: Governing from a Distance in Australia analyzes how notions of property ownership were instrumental in maintaining family stability and continuity in rural Australia, outlining how inheritance and divorce laws functioned to govern the internal relationships of families to assist the state to ‘rule from a distance’. Using a selection of Foucault’s ideas on the “family”, sexuality, race, space and economics this books shows how “property” operated as a disciplinary device, which was underpinned by “technical ideas”, such as surveying and cartography. This book uses legal judgments as a form of ethnography to show how property, as a socio-technical device, allowed a degree of local freedom for owners. This aspect of property allowed the state to stimulate ideas of local freedom to assist in “ruling from a distance,” demonstrating how the rural family as a domestic unit became a key field of intervention for the state as the family represented a bridge to larger relationships of power.